I had a bit of a trawl through the board to find out about visa options and on page 4 found this comment from Sachadroogie and gave up my search!

"A sticky would be out-of-date in less than six-months! Therein lies the problem of answering your question. "

Me and my boyfriend have been job hunting a while now (bad time of year I know) and would ideally love to find work in St Petersburg. We've had no luck so far and our current contracts have ended, so we were wondering whether it might be best just to come over for a holiday intitially and visit some schools once there. We have a friend living in St P who can sort out a visa invite. We both have a DELTA, several years' experience and an MA in my boyfriends case.

Is it possible to come over on a tourist visa initially then have it converted to a work visa once there if we find work? Would it be too much of a gamble, and would we be leaving ourselves open to exploitation from schools unwilling to pay for visas etc?

We want a decent job in a decent school and don't really want to apply for 'McSchools' for the sake of getting there, after having just paid for and gone through the DELTA.

It is not possible to have tourist visas "converted" into a work visa; you'd have to get a new invite from a company and apply again. You could get a 3-month business visa and look for work while in SPB and apply for a new one in Vilnius when it expires and reenter right after. Many do this who are in the process of getting residency, looking for work, heck, even working, so they don't have to leave the country for longer than a couple days (that is, every three months) -- maybe they have family, clients, business, whatever. This is the route I'd recommend short-term. Feel free to write me if you want specifics.